Set permissions at the group level so that Red people have one experience when visiting your page…and Green people another.

For example:

People in the Green group can see everything that I make public to Facebook

People in the Red group can see virtually nothing about me

Yellow? As you can imagine, that is “inbetween”

TooYoungForFacebook can see everything…except my status updates

Here are the steps:

1. Categorize your friends into groups

Facebook.com => Account => Edit Friends

Click on Create a List

A box will pop up which asks you to name the list…and then add people to it

Click on Create New List

2. Set the permissions

Facebook.com => Account=> Privacy Settings

Customize Settings

For each entry on that page, click on Edit Settings…and then select Custom

From there, the key is the Hide this from tool.(When you start to type the name of a group…Facebook auto-completes it for you)

For example: My Religious and political views can be seen by Friends (not Friends of Friends) plus my network. However, if you are Red or Yellow…you can’t see it

Yes…this one-time set-up takes a while…and if you have hundreds of friends, it may be too late for you to do this. But, once it’s in place…it’s actually very liberating.

In closing

When you accept a new friend request, Facebook will automatically ask you what group you want to put them in, so that’s cool.

You may need to periodically “sweep through” your groups to be sure that members are appropriately classified (relationships change over time, right?)

You need to be a steward of your own data: There is nothing in Facebook which prevents people from being in two groups (or no groups) .

Finally: there is a very cool feature on that page (Choose Your Privacy Settings => Customize settings): the ability to Preview My Profile. It enables you to Preview how your profile appears to a specific person.